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After load shedding was suspended over the weekend, interrupting our longest continuous run in history, it’s back to business as usual.

Here in Cape Town, we’ve been spared but across the country, it’s stages one and two all week.

You don’t need anybody to tell you how dysfunctional our national power (f)utility is. That said, it’s still jarring to read about insiders describing the rot at Eskom.

Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt certainly didn’t mince his words when speaking on a webinar last week. He called Eskom “financially and operationally unsalvageable” and predicted a similar trajectory as South African Airways (SAA).

This from MyBroadband:

“SAA had ten turnaround plans, and they all failed. The company was ultimately run into the ground financially and operationally,” he said. “Eskom will go the same way.”

The best way to handle Eskom is to treat it like a private sector company and place it into business rescue.

Roodt said this would mean tens of thousands of Eskom employees will and must lose their jobs.

That is highly unlikely to happen.

In fact, Eskom employees were given a 7% pay increase in June after unions threatened strikes which would have resulted in stage six load shedding or worse.

Holding an entire country’s power to ransom is quite a strong bargaining tool:

Roodt said Eskom will get privatised, whether the government likes it or not.

“Eskom has been run into the ground, and the only way to get reliable electricity is for the private sector to provide it,” he said.

Back in the real world, energy minister Gwede Mantashe has spoken about a ‘second Eskom’, as in a second state-owned power utility to challenge Eskom’s monopoly.

The cadres must feed and their hunger never abates. Neither does their power supply, which they don’t pay for, along with free water as well.

 Eskom CEO André de Ruyter appears to be pushing against the tide when trying to clean house. The internal power struggles have once more been laid bare by a boiler-maintenance company challenging Eskom in court, which has led to internal documents entering the public domain.

That’s been covered in detail by Business Insider SA’s Phillip de Wet:

Eskom’s poor energy-availability performance is generally blamed on the sheer age of its coal-fired power stations.

But board minutes and internal reports suggest it is also simply terrible at making sensible decisions.

Babcock Ntuthuko Engineering is challenging the awarding of tenders by Eskom to its biggest rival.

The legal record runs to more than 6 000 pages and shows Eskom stumbling “from one near-disaster to another”:

Eskom’s submissions show its estimate of the four-year value of such work went from R17 billion in mid-2018 to R21 billion by mid-2019.

The documents also show that, at times, Eskom believed it desperately needed Babcock, because there are barely enough qualified welders available to keep its coal-fired power stations going even with all three companies working flat-out.

You’re welcome to carry on down that road here if you want a play-by-play of criminal dysfunctionality.

Let us in the Mother City be thankful for the Steenbras Pumped Storage Plant and the proactive approach to trying to reduce our reliance on the national power grid.

[sources:mybb&businsider]